Today the medical imaging technology is advancing rapidly. Medical images of patients are being capture using technologies such as x-rays, ultrasound computerized tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, nuclear medicine (NM) imaging, positron emission computed tomography (PET), etc., to be electronically acquired, stored, retrieved, displayed, and transmitted for viewing by medical personnel. The acronym, PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), is an industry term for an integrated system of equipment and software that permits radiographic images, such as x-rays, ultrasound computerized tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, nuclear medicine (NM) imaging, positron emission computed tomography (PET), etc., to be electronically acquired, stored, retrieved, displayed, and transmitted for viewing by medical personnel. The PACS system may include an interface, which is a software application, which aids in accessing and retrieval of images stored in the PACS database. The queries received for a set of images are matched by DICOM header of the images stored in the PACS.
The Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard describes a file format for media storage and image distributions. The standard was created by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) to aid the distribution and viewing of medical images, such as CT scans, MEDICALIs, and ultrasound. The DICOM format includes a header portion and an image data portion.
The DICOM format uses a series of pre-defined tags and allows the definition of new tags, which may or may not be present for a given dataset. This flexibility is one of the features that made the DICOM format so popular for medical imaging. Nevertheless, this popularity had led to the multiplication of tag definitions, and consequently, it is sometimes difficult to know which tags are used, and what they mean, making the extraction of header information more difficult. DICOM tags may include meta information that provide information associated with the medical image such as, details of the patient, the modality manufacturer, clinical findings, and the like. In certain embodiments, the DICOM tags may also contain the image acquisition protocol. Sometimes, the DICOM header does not contain the image acquisition protocol as it is an optional tag. This becomes are problem when multiple series of images of a particular imaging protocol needs to compared for analysis. If the DICOM header does not contain the image acquisition protocol, the medical personnel have to manually search for the images. This procedure consumes a lot of time and effort. Therefore, there is a need for an easier method to recognize the image acquisition protocol of image sets. Further, there is also a need for comparing two (2) image sets with the same protocol for analysis, without relying on the DICOM tag for referring to the image acquisition protocol.